I occupy the smallest room in our house—the one beside the stairs. Before me, the room belonged to my parents. Before them, it belonged to my father when he was in his teens.
Beside my room is the biggest room in the house, even bigger than the master bedroom. It belongs to my sister. When I didn’t have my own room yet, my mom and I slept beside each other in that room. I could not sleep without my mom beside me then. We lay on a comfy mattress on the floor while my sister slept on her bed.
When my widowed grandmother died, my parents moved to the master bedroom. Strangely, the master bedroom had two beds—my grandfather occupied the one on the right, and my grandmother the other. She explained that when she and my grandfather quarreled, they slept separately. Otherwise, they slept on the bed on the left. But when my parents moved to the master bedroom, they slept on separate beds.
When the smallest room was not yet mine, I woke up at exactly 8 a.m. during weekdays and went to watch TV there. My classes started at 10 a.m., so I had more than enough time to tune in to Cartoon Network. On Saturday, my sister and I hung out in the same room and watched TV all day. We switched channels from cartoons to music to movies and back to cartoons. We laughed out loud watching “Ren and Stimpy,” sang our lungs out to the music, and cowered under the same pillow when HBO showed a horror flick. Sunday morning right after attending Mass, we stayed in the room up until lunch and watched cartoons. After lunch, we worked on our respective school assignments. On weeknights when there was not much homework, we watched TV until bedtime.
I’ve stayed in the smallest room in the house for the past decade. I recall my first few days there. It reeked of fresh paint but I stayed inside, with the door locked, and watched TV all day. The paint must have had some sleep-inhibiting chemical because I was unable to sleep for days. Good thing it was summer, and I was young and privileged: It did not matter if I started my day at 11 a.m. and ended it at 3 a.m.
After a few days, my mother bought me a desktop computer. I immediately set up the internet, then installed video games. While the TV was on, I played online RPG the whole summer with my friends. Every week, I asked for P450 from my mother. I used it to buy the prepaid card worth P450, good for five whole days.
For two summers I spent each day in front of the computer, playing video games with the TV on. I figured that I was not able to comprehend what was on TV, anyway, so I just tuned it to a music channel. Now, whenever I hear Maroon 5’s “This Love,” I’d recall those summer days in front of the computer. I’d recall how I grew oblivious to the world around me.
My day began at 11 a.m. I’d go down to eat breakfast for five minutes then return to my room, go online, and play video games. Come 3 p.m., my stomach would growl dauntingly. I’d go down to get some food, then go back upstairs to my room to eat. Come 9 p.m., I’d bring the plates down and then eat dinner by myself for five minutes.
One night after my mother was done with her work, she came to my room. She played with my hair and then asked me if I wanted to sleep beside her in the master bedroom. I told her I’d go there as soon as I got sleepy, but I never did. I passed out at around 4 a.m. in front of the computer. The next night my mom came back and asked me if she could sleep in my room. I said the bed was too small for the two of us. She asked: “How come you couldn’t sleep without me by your side before?” I told her that things were different now, then continued playing video games.
As the years passed, my room became crammed with papers from school, documents from work, and letters from my exes. I put them in brown envelopes that I slid under my bed. By the time I graduated from high school, the space under my bed was filled with brown envelopes. As for my sister who had the biggest room in the house, storage was not a problem. I sneaked into her room once and saw her personal effects sheltered in big plastic boxes—some under the bed, others stacked in one corner. She would go on to complete her master’s degree with ample space left in her room. I, on the other hand, was desperate for breathing room. My room got smaller with each passing day.
Stacks of books have become walls. Under the books are photocopied readings—both crimped and untouched. Beside the books are pens, cigarette butts, movie tickets, dusty combs, empty cell phone boxes, and broken guitar strings. My mother—who, I suspected, would go into my room while I was away—bought a wooden bookshelf big enough to store all my things. My desktop computer, too, was replaced by a laptop.
But even if I immediately arranged my things and disposed of trash, my room was still bereft of its former warm ambiance. The smallest room in the house was just sweltering hot inside: Beads of sweat immediately formed on my forehead seconds after I entered it. Without the air conditioner on, the room was uninhabitable. Unlike before when I spent weekends cozily camped inside, my room has been reduced to a sleeping chamber.
Now, instead of holing up in my room, I spend weekends in the living room with my dad. We’d tune in to the NBA games every Saturday morning, Pacquiao’s fights on Sunday, and when there was nothing good on TV, we’d listen to the Beatles and Michael Jackson. One afternoon, when the music stopped and my dad had fallen asleep on his chair, I approached the player beside him to put in a fresh CD. I looked at him and observed how quickly the wrinkles had formed on his face. After putting in the CD, I looked for our photo albums, looked at the pictures, and was saddened by how quickly time had flown. I looked at pictures of him and my mom inside the smallest room in the house, hugging each other: my mom staring into my dad’s piercing blue eyes, my dad caressing my mom’s curly black hair.
Back then the smallest room in the house was almost empty: It had only a TV set with a VHS player and a small bed on which my parents fit snugly. The bed was so small; I imagined that they had to hug each other tightly so that one of them wouldn’t fall off.
My dad hasn’t entered the smallest room in the house since he gave it to me. He only goes in and out of the master bedroom, where, despite the two beds, only one is occupied at night. My mom sleeps somewhere else now, in a different bed, in a different room, in a different house. The biggest room in the house, the one that belongs to my sister, is empty during weekdays. She has moved somewhere near her workplace and comes home only during weekends. At times she’d catch me watching TV in the living room and we’d laugh together like we used to. But most of the time, it’s the TV static that fills the silence between us.
Virgil S. Villanueva, 26, is pursuing a career in film.